It seems that many people think that the word “love” has been used up and no longer means much, if anything, anymore. But, what can actual genuine love do? Many, many things actually.

Love can heal and it will protect, love is kind and patient, love bear burdens that lust cannot; Love doesn’t mean that you don’t apologize for a wrong, but that you can bear up and endure through the trials and heartache that come from it. Love is caring and compassionate, even when the one being cared for may be one that tried to kill you. Love is an emotion, a feeling, but it is also hope for tomorrow and faith in the future as well. Love is all of these things and more.

Love, the kind that you feel from your mother or grandmother, can fix hurts, mend problems between siblings, and it just feels like home as no other place or feeling can. You can’t duplicate it and you can’t fake it, you either love someone truly or you don’t.

Just as being on one side of a fence or the other, you can’t be on both, and with love there is no real middle ground. True, there are different kinds of love, such as the love felt between friends or for family, then there is the erotic type of love/lust that is so rampant today. So what can real love do for you?

It heals and it prolongs your life. It also lowers your blood pressure and eases stress. All of these positive outcomes from one simple emotion. Is it really so simple? I don’t think so. Love is expressed between people of all ages but it is most effective when it is inside a family, between a man and a woman and their children, which is how and why God ordained the family unit to be the model for all of us.

Love, real love, expressed in this way can last through generations not just a few years or decades. God’s love has been available to all of us since we were able to understand it, yet He has loved and cared for us since the beginning. His love is perfect in that it requires nothing from us, it just flows from Him to us. Yes, He desires our love and for our love to flow back to Him, but it is our choice and cannot be forced.

That is the one requirement that cannot change, ever: Love is not forced and cannot be. You can’t make someone love you, even if you love them. They either will or they won’t, anything beyond that is tolerance or hatred. Which is where Satan stands, on the side of hatred. He despises God and His children, and he will do anything to hurt and rip into the church and its members, as well as those that they love. That is what we are here to do, to love those outside the church with the love that God gives to us so that they might want it too.